Conscious Choice Seattle: Cases of ‘Nature-Deficit Disorder

August 2005 | Cover Report part 2

Cases of ‘Nature-Deficit Disorder

By Richard Louv

My earliest memory of using my senses, and sensing wonder in nature, came on a cold spring morning in Independence, Mo. I was perhaps 3 years old, sitting in a dry field behind my grandmother’s peeling Victorian home.

Nearby, my father worked, planting a garden. He threw down a cigarette. The dry grass caught fire. I remember the exact sound of the flames and smell of the smoke and the whoosh of my father’s leg and foot as he stamped and stepped quickly to chase the fire as it skipped across the field.

In this same field, I would walk around the fallen fruit from a pear tree, hold my nose and bend at the waist, a careful distance from the small mounds of ferment, and then experimentally inhale. I would sit down among the decaying fruit, attracted and repulsed.

I spent hours exploring the woods and farmland at the suburban edge. There were the Osage orange trees, with thorny, unfriendly limbs that dropped sticky, foul fruit larger than softballs. Those were to be avoided. But within the windbreaks were trees that we could shinny, the small branches like the rungs of a ladder. We climbed 50, 60 feet off the ground, far above the Osage windbreak, and from that vantage looked out upon the old blue ridges of Missouri, and the roofs of new houses in the ever-encroaching suburbs.

Many members of my generation grew into adulthood taking nature’s gifts for granted; we assumed (when we thought of it at all) that generations to come would also receive these gifts. But something has changed.

Now we see the emergence of what I have come to call nature-deficit disorder. This term is by no means a medical diagnosis, but it does offer a way to think about the problem and the possibilities — for children, and for the rest of us as well.

My own awareness of the transformation began in the late 1980s, during research for “ Childhood’s Future, ” a book about the new realities of family life. I interviewed nearly 3,000 children and parents across the country, in urban, suburban and rural areas. In classrooms and living rooms, the topic of the children’s relationship with nature sometimes surfaced.

I think often of a wonderfully honest comment made by Paul, a fourth-grader in San Diego: “I like to play indoors better, ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”

“It’s all this watching,” said a mother. “We’ve become a more sedentary society. When I was a kid growing up in Detroit, we were always outdoors. The kids who stayed indoors were the odd ones.”

Another parent said “we may be out jogging, but the kids just aren’t outside.”

One day, I drove across the Kansas-Missouri border to my own childhood elementary school near Kansas City.

As the teachers gathered second- through fifth-graders and escorted them into the classroom where I waited, I unpacked my tape recorder and glanced out the window. I looked at the blue-green ridge of trees, probably pin oak, maple, cottonwood or perhaps pecan or honey locust, their limbs shivering and swaying slowly in the spring breeze. How often, as a child, had those very trees inspired my daydreams?

During the next hour, as I asked the young people about their relationship with the outdoors, they described some of the barriers to going outside — lack of time, TV, the usual suspects. But the reality of these barriers did not mean the children lacked curiosity. In fact, these kids spoke of nature with a strange mixture of puzzlement, detachment and yearning — and occasional defiance.

Woods and worries

“My parents don’t feel real safe if I’m going too deep in the woods,” said one boy. “I just can’t go too far. My parents are always worrying about me. So I’ll just go, and usually not tell ’em where I’m going — so that makes ’em mad. But I’ll just sit behind a tree or something, or lay in the field with all the rabbits.”

One boy said computers were more important than nature, because computers are where the jobs are. Several said they were too busy to go outside. But one girl, a fifth-grader wearing a plain print dress and an intensely serious expression, told me she wanted to be a poet when she grew up.

“When I’m in the woods,” she said, “I feel like I’m in my mother’s shoes.”

Then she described her special part of the woods.

“I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I’d dug a big hole there, and sometimes I’d take a tent back there, or a blanket, and just lay down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometimes I’d fall asleep back in there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day.”

The young poet’s face flushed. Her voice thickened.

“And then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me.”
Over time I came to understand some of the complexity represented by the boy who preferred electrical outlets and the poet who had lost her special spot in the woods. I learned this: Parents, educators, other adults, institutions — the culture itself — may say one thing to children about nature’s gifts, but so many of our actions and messages — especially the ones we cannot hear ourselves deliver — are different.

And children hear very well.

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